Oxen of the Sun
“Deshil Holles Eamus.”
Bloom visits a friend in labour. Medical students drink upstairs; the prose grows from Anglo-Saxon to modern slang, mirroring the development of a child.
- Beat 01Opening incantation
The episode opens with three triple chants — a kind of incantation in Latinate prose — before settling into pastiche of old English chronicles.
- Beat 02Bloom enters the hospital
Bloom calls in at the maternity hospital on Holles Street to ask after Mina Purefoy, who has been three days in labour. He is shown into a common room of carousing medical students.
- Beat 03Drinking and arguing
Stephen is there, drunk, with Buck Mulligan, Lenehan, Lynch, and others. They argue about birth, contraception, motherhood, and religion in a thickening cloud of beer and bad jokes.
- Beat 04The styles of English
The prose moves chronologically through English style — Anglo-Saxon, Mandeville, Malory, the Authorized Version, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne, Dickens, Carlyle — as if the chapter itself were gestating in real time.
- Beat 05Birth and storm
Mina Purefoy is finally delivered of a healthy boy. A thunderstorm breaks over Dublin. The pastiche fractures into a Babel of modern slang — pidgin, evangelical preaching, street English.
- Beat 06Off to Burke's, then Nighttown
The students pour out to Burke's pub, then on toward the brothel district. Bloom follows Stephen, worried for him, into the next chapter.
Ten at night. Bloom drops in at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street to ask after Mrs Purefoy, a friend who has been in labour for three days. In a back room he finds Stephen drinking with a rowdy gang of medical students who are talking, with varying degrees of seriousness, about birth, contraception, infant mortality, what the Church says about sex, what nature says about sex, whether women exist mostly to suffer. The trick — and it is a trick — is that Joyce narrates the whole chapter by impersonating, in chronological order, the entire history of English prose: medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration, eighteenth-century, Victorian, all the way up to modern slang. The style itself 'gestates' as the baby is born. Eventually a healthy boy arrives upstairs, the men spill out into the rainy street roaringly drunk, and Bloom, sober, watches Stephen heading off with the worst of the crew toward the red-light district. He decides, without any drama, to follow him and keep him out of serious trouble. Underneath the literary fireworks the chapter is a moral one: a room full of clever men talking flippantly about reproduction while, in the next room, a woman is actually doing it — and Bloom, the only one paying attention, deciding to act as a father toward a young man who isn't his son.
- Scene
- The Hospital
- Hour
- 10:00 PM
- Organ
- Womb
- Art
- Medicine
- Color
- White
- Symbol
- Mothers
- Technic
- Embryonic development
- Correspondence
- Oxen of the Sun